What is known
Harry was born about 1740 in West Africa, probably on the Gambia River, and sold across the Atlantic. In 1763 George Washington bought him for the Great Dismal Swamp company, the land-draining venture in which Washington was a partner, and afterward brought him to Mount Vernon, where he worked with the horses. On July 29, 1771, he ran. Washington paid one pound sixteen shillings to advertise for him, and he was brought back within weeks.
The register says he left Washington seven years before 1783, that is, in 1776, the year after Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offered freedom to the enslaved people of rebels who would join the King’s forces. A list kept at Mount Vernon puts a Harry, “Horseler,” about 40, among the seventeen people who went aboard the sloop of war Savage when she anchored off the plantation in April 1781. The two accounts have not been reconciled; Cassandra Pybus, who has followed his life furthest, takes the register’s date. In New York he served as a corporal in the Black Pioneers, the Black Loyalist labour corps attached to the Royal Artillery, and went south with the army to the siege of Charlestown in 1780.
On July 31, 1783, he was inspected at New York for L’Abondance, the King’s storeship that carried more people in the register than any other vessel: 425 on this sailing, among them Boston King and Peter Pharo of the twenty-nine. Three months earlier, on April 28, Washington had written from headquarters at Newburgh to Daniel Parker, an American contractor at New York: “Some of my own Slaves, and those of Mr Lund Washington who lives at my House may probably be in N. York: but I am unable to give you their Descriptions, their Names, being so easily changed will be fruitless to give you, If by chance you should come at the knowlege of any of them, I will be much obliged by your securing them, so that I may obtain them again.” The clerks wrote Harry down under Washington’s own name and gave him a certificate.
At Birchtown, the Black settlement beside Shelburne, the muster of 1784 lists him with his wife Jenny. In January 1792 they were among the nearly 1,200 Black Nova Scotians who sailed for Sierra Leone under John Clarkson. There the settlers’ quarrel with the Sierra Leone Company over quit-rents on their land came to a head in September 1800, when a group of them posted their own code of laws. Harry Washington, about sixty, was among those tried by a military tribunal after Jamaican Maroons newly landed in the colony put the rising down. He and two dozen others were banished across the river to the Bullom Shore, where he helped lead the exiles’ settlement. The record ends there.
Sources
The register entry, Nova Scotia Archives dataset and the Black Loyalist Heritage Society transcription. Washington to Daniel Parker, Head Quarters, April 28, 1783, Founders Online; the manuscript’s long dashes are shown as commas, as elsewhere on this site. Mount Vernon, “H.M.S. Savage,” Digital Encyclopedia, citing Lund Washington’s list of 1781 and Mary V. Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret” (2019). Cassandra Pybus, “Washington’s Revolution: Harry that is not George,” Atlantic Studies 3:2 (2006), and Epic Journeys of Freedom (2006), chapters on Harry Washington. The 1771 advertisement and the 1763 purchase follow Pybus. Later traces in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone are her identifications.